FAMU Student in the Oscar 2020 Nominations

Daughter by Daria Kashcheeva managed to keep the momentum it had from its Student Academy Award win, and the film became the first Czech production (after Michaela Pavlátová’s Repete) to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animation Short.

Kashcheeva wrote the storyline for Daughter five years ago as part of her entrance exams to FAMU. The story then gathered dust for quite a long time before Kashcheeva returned to it at the end of her second year. “I spent about six months developing the script and the storyboard. Creating the set and puppets took four months of very intense work and another intense four months of 12-hour shifts went into the animation. The final postproduction took about three months,” says Kashcheeva when giving an overview of the creative process.

Daria Kashcheeva comes from Tajikistan. When she was four, her family was forced to flee the civil war that broke out after the fall of the USSR. They moved to a small town in Russia, which she later left to study and work in Moscow and then moved to the Czech Republic with her husband.

Kashcheeva already has a storyline for her next film, which will be her final project for her master’s studies at FAMU. Once again, she does not take the easy option. “I’d like to have live actors in the movie and combine live-action, pixilation (editor’s note – a technique where live actors are used as subjects in an animated film), puppet and object animation,” she says.